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The Nobels are a lagging indicator, not a bellwether

We've got a question going around: it's been a good year for Europe in the Nobel Prizes, so what does it mean for American science? Are we slipping? Is there a European bias? I'm going to go way out here on a limb and say the obvious: it means nothing at all. Winning a Nobel does have a political element to it, of course, but the people who win these things usually have a track record of decades of work, and the Nobel is just the most prominent tip of the iceberg of the scientific enterprise. It's hard to judge trends in the foundations of research from the year-to-year vagaries of what's…

How Many Physics Professors Does It Take?

Johan Larson emails a suggestion for a post topic: How many profs would it take to offer a good, but not necessarily excellent, undergraduate physics degree? I can give you an empirical answer to this: Six. I say that because in the course of my undergraduate physics degree at Williams, I took classes from only six different professors. Five-and-a-half, really, because one of those was half of a team-taught course. I had three-and-a-half classes with one professor, and two others for two classes each. Of course, that's not a hard lower bound. Some have even suggested that the number could be…

Two Cultures Defining Research

I was initially puzzled by the headline "Research-Assignment Handouts Give Students Meager Guidance, Survey Finds," and the opening sentences didn't help much: Most research-assignment handouts given to undergraduates fail to guide the students toward a comprehensive strategy for completing the work, according to two researchers at the University of Washington who are studying how students conduct research and find information. My initial reaction was "If I could give them a comprehensive strategy for completing the work, it wouldn't be research." Then I noticed the last three words, and…

I Need to Work on My Sound Bites

One of the questions asked of Neil deGrasse Tyson at the WSF thing last week was "When did you change from a mild-mannered astrophysicist to a rock-star scientist?" (or something close to that phrasing). In his answer, he said that after his first tv interview was edited down to a three-second shot of him wiggling his hips, he made a deliberate effort to practice giving sound bites-- answering questions in 3-4 sentences with a good "hook" for the tv people to work with. I thought of this when I stumbled across the following YouTube clips, which were shot by TV Ontario when I was at the…

Bath-Time Fluid Dynamics

SteelyKid's every-so-often bath was last night, and as always, she was fascinated by scooping up water in a hexagonal cup thing that's part of one of her bath toys, and watching it drain out. Which is completely understandable-- not just because she's a baby, but because there's a bunch of physics at work, here. I realize this is trampling on Rhett's territory, but I made a little video showing the physics part (in the sink, not the tub, because I don't want to have the pay the therapy bills that would come from posting video of SteelyKid in the tub): The explanation is laid out in the video…

Links for 2010-04-30

The Science and Entertainment Exchange: The X-Change Files: Zap! Or, Where Would Science Fiction Movies be Without Lasers? "Science fiction was right on top of this new development and even foresaw it. In 1898, H. G. Wells introduced an invisible but powerful heat ray as the weapon of choice for invading Martians in his story The War of the Worlds. Today, that would be an infrared CO2 laser. In the 1930s, space swashbucklers Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon used hand-held ray weapons in their movie serials. In the 1950s, The Day the Earth Stood Still and the film version of The War of the…

Conference Organizers Should Not Live in Caves

A sad and sordid story from the Times Higher Education following the rescinding of invitations to a conference on quantum foundations: Details of the conference in August for experts in quantum mechanics sounded idyllic. Participants were due to discuss "de Broglie-Bohm theory and beyond" in the Towler Institute, which is housed in a 16th-century monastery in the Tuscan Alps owned by Mike Towler, Royal Society research fellow at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory. Last week, any veneer of serenity was shattered. Conference organiser Antony Valentini, research associate in the…

Is the latest claim regarding "chimp-human" inbreeding a bunch of hooey?

Yes, but not necessarily because it is wrong. Some time ago researchers proposed that the modern DNA signal indicated that chimps and humans continued to interbreed long after they split in evolutionary time. A new study refutes this, and as the author states, this new study is more correct because it "simpler and hence more likely". Wow. Let us begin at the beginning: There was no interbreeding between chimps and humans. not even "early humans," because they did not exist yet, so when Elie Dolgin (or a Nature editor? Henry?) makes this statement: "A genetic analysis has called into…

Who the heck is ‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith?

I've never heard of her before—I guess you have to be familiar with the routine quackery of the health food store to know of her—but she certainly sounds like a real piece of work. The Guardian has an entertaining exposé of her claims and her tactics. She's one of those people who makes extravagant claims for dietary supplements that she sells, backing them up with loads of pretentious and utterly bogus pseudoscientific gobbledygook. She says DNA is an anti-ageing constituent: if you "do not have enough RNA/DNA", in fact, you "may ultimately age prematurely". Stress can deplete your DNA, but…

New Geo Paper from Mars Rover "Opportunity" Out Today

The Mars rover Opportunity has explored Victoria crater, a ~750-meter eroded impact crater formed in sulfate-rich sedimentary rocks. Impact-related stratigraphy is preserved in the crater walls, and meteoritic debris is present near the crater rim. The size of hematite-rich concretions decreases up-section, documenting variation in the intensity of groundwater processes. Layering in the crater walls preserves evidence of ancient wind-blown dunes. Compositional variations with depth mimic those ~6 kilometers to the north and demonstrate that water-induced alteration at Meridiani Planum was…

Colorado crazy

A Colorado state senator (a Republican from Colorado Springs, of course), Dave Schultheis, is pushing a draft of an absurd bill to open public schools wide to religious indoctrination, all in the name of the first amendment to the constitution. It's a demand to create a "Public School Religious Bill Of Rights", with a long list of religious privileges. Some of them are trivial: it ought to be OK for students to give each other holiday cards with religious sentiments (and of course, they already can), or greet each other with religious slogans (like, say, "Merry Christmas"…hasn't the war on…

Cellular safety shelters allow TB agent to survive in infected individuals

Imagine that you are a bad guy running from the law, and the sheriff is about to catch up to you. If you want, you can be Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid or any other charismatic bad guy. Or maybe you're a wizard in Harry Potter and Dementors are about to catch up to you. But then, just as the sheriff, or the Dementor, or whatever, catches up, you wave a magic wand and instead of killing or capturing you, your nemesis transforms into a big tent inside of which you can hide. And the tent is made out of food that you can eat. This, metaphorically (and thus not exactly accurate, but…

Liveblogging the Results: Yes we can

McCain is conceding . The crowd is booing Obama, McCain has to calm them down. Now, here, and over the next couple of weeks, McCain has to put the horrors back into the Pandora's Box that he and Sarah Palin opened. Some people are probably going to die because of the way they ran their campaign. It is his (and Palin's) responsibility to mitigate the damage they've done. There are only a few more states left. No more updates from me. Indiana will go Obama by one percent. Montana ... we'll have to wait. I think they count the ballots with mules, takes longer. Missouri will go McCain,…

Tuesday may turn out to be a nightmare

I have reanalyzed the electoral map with the latest information. Applying some reasonable criteria (see below) to the most current information, a very reasonable conclusion is that the electoral vote not counting Pennsylvania will be Obama 252 vs. McCain 265. Neither of these numbers is above the required number to win. Starting at this base, the candidate who wins Pennsylvania wins the election. I am not prepared to put Pennsylvania in either column for the following reasons: 1) All of the effects in my adjustment criteria (outlined below) are strongest in Pennsylvania and 2) McCain and…

I am so happy that Steven Weinberg is on our side

Steven Weinberg reviews The God Delusion. It's almost entirely positive—one exception is that he takes Dawkins to task for being too even-handed and well-intentioned towards Islam. I particularly enjoyed his criticisms of the critics. Here's a familiar argument: The reviews of The God Delusion in the New York Times and the New Republic took Dawkins to task for his contemptuous rejection of the classic "proofs" of the existence of God. I agree with Dawkins in his rejection of these proofs, but I would have answered them a little differently. The "ontological proof" of St Anselm asks us first…

Sunday Chess Problem

One of the underappreciated aspects of chess composition is that some problems have a sense of humor. Sure, the real classics show deep and surprising ideas and do so with impressive constructional finesse. But other problems just bring a smile to your face. This week I have two such problems for you. Neither is difficult to solve. In fact, they are both trivial to solve. But both made me smile when I saw them, and that makes them good problems in my book! Last week I reported on The US Amateur Team East chess tournament. One of the great joys of this tournament is the chess bookstore…

Evolutionary Creation?

A while back I did a post criticizing the idea that theistic evolution is a form of intelligent design. My argument was that theistic evolutionists accept modern evolutionary science as essentially correct, but also believe that it is not the whole story. This is relevantly different from those who say that modern science is rotten to the core. In the political arena theistic evolutionists are on the right side of issues in science education, whereas the ID folks are on the wrong side. For those reasons, it is simply unfair to equate the two. Or so I argued, at any rate. I stand by that…

Euler's Identity, Part Two

Time to show you the dramatic conclusion to the story I began yesterday. Our problem was to define the complex exponential function in a way that was consistent with everything we knew about real exponential functions. We noticed that one of the standard rules for exponents implies \[ e^{x+iy}=e^xe^{iy}. \] Since we already know how to deal with the first term in that product on the right-hand side, our problem has been reduced to deciding what to do with “pure imaginary” exponents. The key to doing that is to remember that we have a Taylor series expansion for the exponential function…

National Geographic Explorer: The Virus Hunters

NatGeo had a pretty sweet program on the other night on viruses! I guess they made it like a couple years ago, but I somehow totally missed it!! If you read ERV, there was probably nothing new there for you, but its neat to *see* the scientists I talk about portrayed as creepy guys talking to themselves in deserted diners, surrounded by 3-inch-tall dancing chimpanzees. ROFL!!! National Geographic Explorer: The Virus Hunters Few things I want to say-- Scientists do not all work in poorly lit rooms surrounded by tubes of bubbling colored liquids. Sometimes there are lasers and radioactive…

Hey, what did you all do today?

I learned how to file a police report for 'stalking', and how to get a victim protection order in the state of Oklahoma. :-/ Yes, I have a real-life, for real stalker. Its something my parents have been worried about since I started this blog. They have actually been pissed at me for agreeing to do debates, and such, considering the lunacy of True Believers. The man whos stalking me? Just got obsessed with me since he got put in a near-by half-way house (reminder: all of my 'neighbors' are half-way houses. I do not live in a 'nice part of town'). I have no idea what his name is. I have no…

Viral Mysteries: Colony Collapse Disorder

Im sure this isnt news to any of you-- Honey Bees are dying. We dont know why. I thought we had an answer to this problem, and the answer was a virus-- Israeli acute paralysis virus. But although IAPV definitely has an effect on honey bee immunity, apparently it fell through as The Cause of CCD. We do not have a honey bee parasitome/microme/virome, so we dont totally know which parasites/microbes/viruses are 'normal' and which are the trouble makers, out of the countless parasites/microbes/viruses found in honey bee colonies all over the world. So it could be that CCD is some kind of '…

Paleovirology-- HIV-1s ancestors just got older

Lentiviruses, we think, are evolutionarily young. For example-- you have retroviruses in your DNA (ERVs) from other genuses (genii?) genera of retrovirus that are millions and millions of years old. So we know those other genuses (genii?) genera are millions and millions of years old. Lentiviruses, on the other hand, havent left us many of these kinds of fossils for us to figure out their age. We can still put out a good estimate, though. For instance-- SIV is all over the place in non-human primates in Africa. And while its ubiquitious in Africa (implying 'old'), its not found in non-…

Animal Witness: The Michael Vick Case

Tonight at 10 pm EST, Animal Planet is running a special on the Michael Vick case, from the drug arrest that led to the discovery of the fighting ring, to what happened to the ~50 rescued dogs. I know there are lots of dog lovers who read ERV, so I wanted to give you all the heads up. I also suggest individuals with an irrational fear of pit bulls, or dogs in general watch, with the hope that viewing this program will save their respective souls. If you cant tune in, there are lots of great pics/videos/resources at the Animal Planet website. A couple groups have gotten to review the show…

Newsweek on Human Evolution

Allow me to direct your attention to the cover story from the current issue of Newsweek. It provides a useful summary of recent developments in human evolution. It's a decent article, and I recommend reading it through to the end. There are, however, a few irritating points: The science of human evolution is undergoing its own revolution. Although we tend to see the march of species down through time as a single-file parade, with descendant succeeding ancestor in a neat line, the emerging science shows that the story of our species is far more complicated than Biblical literalists would…

On Computer Color

This year's "Flame Challenge" is to explain color in terms an 11-year-old can follow. I have opinions on this subject, a background in AMO physics, and access to scientific equipment, so I'm putting something together. In the course of this, though, it occurred to me to wonder how my different portable computing devices process color. And since I have access to an Ocean Optics USB4000 spectrometer, I can answer this question in more detail than anybody needs. So, I have three principal electronic devices that I use to do computer-type things: a Moto X smartphone, an iPad, and a Lenovo…

Sherlock Holmes

I saw the new movie Sherlock Holmes over the weekend. Short review: I liked it far more than I expected to, though it is a bit silly in places. Longer review, with a few spoilers, below the fold. A number of years ago there was an atrocity of a movie called Young Sherlock Holmes. Though it made a few gestures in the direction of the original Conan Doyle stories early in the film, it ultimately came down to young Holmes battling a bunch of Satan worshippers, or some such nonsense. The opening scene of the present film features Holmes stopping someone named Lord Blackwood from carrying out…

What are Science/Religion Disputes Really About?

Does anything strike you as odd about the following sentence: Historians have shown that the Galileo affair, remembered by some as a clash between science and religion, was primarily about the enduring political question of who was authorized to produce and disseminate knowledge. It comes from Thomas Dixon's book Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford University Press in 2008. Afficionados of science/religion disputes will recognize in this a standard gambit of the genre. Specifically, the attempt to recast situations that are obviously conflicts between…

The Vileness of Pro-Life Fanatics

Democratic (!!) representative Bart Stupak, apparently concerned that the Senate health care bill is insufficiently misogynistic, might be willing to try to kill health care reform unless the anti-abortion language is strengthened: Stupak's continued opposition to the Senate plan, despite those conversations and intense pressure from the White House, suggests that reconciling it with the House bill may prove politically challenging. The Senate language represented "a dramatic shift in federal policy," said Stupak, adding that he remained hopeful that the differences could be resolved in…

Another Excerpt From Roose's Book

The other day I mentioned the book The Unlikely Disciple, by Kevin Roose, about a Brown Univeristy student who transfers to Liberty University for a semester. The book has all sorts of quotable nuggets, but I especially got a kick out of the following one. I should mention that Roose changed all the names of the people he is describing. On Monday night, the radio debate between Dr. Caner [a professor at Liberty] and the Rational Response Squad finally comes to pass. I listened to the debate -- all three hours and forty minutes of it -- and it was time well spent. The Rational Response…

What's Your TED Talk?

Last weekend, I was talking with Ethan Zuckerman at a party, and we talked a little bit about the TED conferences and similar things. A few days later, there was an editorial in Nature suggesting that scientists could learn a lot from TED: [P]erhaps the most critical key to success is the style of the talks. And here, those scientists wishing to inspire public audiences could take a few tips from the speakers in Oxford who addressed themes as various as biomimicry (Janine Benyus), the neuroscience of other people's rational and moral judgements (Rebecca Saxe) and supermassive black holes (…

Links for 2009-7-27

KR Blog » The Wilderness of Memory "[Chabon asks] a valid question, but I can't escape the feeling that it reflects a particularly American idealization of childhood. Growing up slowly is a privilege of wealth, and few children throughout human history have enjoyed a childhood without the privations of hunger, war, or grinding poverty. " (tags: books literature society culture history class-war kid-stuff blogs) Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood - The New York Review of Books "The thing that strikes me now when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood is the incredible…

PNAS: Rod Charlton, Chemical Engineer

(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Rod Charlton, a retired chemical engineer.) I've been retired for about 5 yrs; perhaps my responses can reflect some of my overall experiences during my career.... see below: Also... in my last decade, my…

Journalists Unclear on the Concept

No, this isn't another "How dare those journalists muddle the explanation of some scientific topic" post. The concept here is journalism itself, as seen in Ed Yong's discussion of different modes of science journalism. Writing about the recent World Conference of Science Journalists, he talks about some controversy over what "science journalism" actually means: Certainly, the idea that journalism equated to talking or writing about science in any form was unpopular. In the opening plenary, Fiona Fox drew a fine line between science communication and journalism, the latter characterised…

Death to the Un-Noted Endnote

This is a rare weekend in which I've completed two serious books-- the aforementioned Newton and the Couterfeiter and Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's Unscientific America (a review copy showed up Friday, thanks guys), about which more later. They're very different books, but both excellent in their own way. While they have very different subjects, though, they have one unfortunate element in common, one of the most pernicious ideas in non-fiction publishing: the un-noted endnote. Both books are exhaustively researched and contain many pages of notes at the end of the text-- just under…

links for 2009-07-02

Newton, P.I. | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine "Happily, Tom Levenson (of The Inverse Square, and one of our honored guest bloggers) has provided us with a fascinating peek into a telling episode in Newtonâs later life â his career as a criminal investigator. Not really âP.I.â, as Newton was acting in his capacity as a government official, the Warden of the Mint. The story is closer to something from Law and Order or CSI â remarkably close, in fact. " (tags: history physics science books levenson blogs cosmic-variance) Confessions of a Community College Dean: Strong Basis in Confusion…

Links for 2011-01-24

Scientists discover snowflake identical to one which fell in 1963 | NewsBiscuit "'It's one of the last remaining challenges known to science and we've cracked it at last,' said lead researcher, Professor Kenneth Libbrecht. 'The team will soon disband to pursue other major scientific challenges, such as the unresolved toast-butter conundrum, and whether or not my baldness makes me a better lover.'" (tags: science physics silly) Coding Horror: The Bad Apple: Group Poison "Groups of four college students were organized into teams and given a task to complete some basic management decisions…

Links for 2011-01-13

Pimp My Novel: Two Households, Both Alike in Dignity "The sample sizes aren't quite identical yet, folks (232 votes this round compared to 342 last round), but currently 54% of those of you who responded own an e-reader, as opposed to only 42% in June 2010. Granted, this is an entirely unscientific survey, but it seems to me that e-reading is on the rise. Not that we couldn't have guessed this already. Speaking of e-books, I thought I'd take a moment to rehash the two primary ways they're sold: via either the agency model or the wholesale model. How does this affect you?" (tags: publishing…

Links for 2011-01-11

Cocktail Party Physics: i think that i shall never see / a carbon offset as lovely as a tree "I heard a NASCAR broadcaster make the following claim: "NASCAR offsets 100% of the carbon emissions from this race via their tree-planting program."  Anytime someone says "100%" or "always" or "without exception", my ears perk up. [...] But tree planting... beautiful PR idea.  Get your biggest stars out to dig the holes, put the trees at a local school or park.  Bingo.  So how many trees do we have to plant? Some brilliant NASCAR PR person did major damage to the cause of logic and educating the…

Links for 2010-12-07

Confessions of a Community College Dean: Research Design in a Recession "My college is planning a major student survey for the Spring. We're drawing up questions that we think could help shape budget priorities over the next few years, assuming there's actually enough money to have some level of discretion. (That's far from certain.) We've got several of the usual questions: have they seen their academic advisor, how often do they use the library, etc. I suggested one asking whether they have internet access at home, so we could get a sense of the degree to which more open computer labs…

Links for 2010-11-25

Surviving the World - Lesson 811 - Thanksgiving Parenting "Thanksgiving is the perfect time of year to evaluate how well you have done as a parent..." (tags: comics internet silly holiday) John Scalzi - Saying Thanksgiving Grace, the Science-fictional Way - Filmcritic.com Feature "We also thank you for once again not allowing our technology to gain sentience, to launch our own missiles at us, to send a robot back in time to kill the mother of the human resistance, to enslave us all, and finally to use our bodies as batteries. That doesn't even make sense from an energy-management point of…

Best. Lab. EVER.

Today's a lab day in my main class for the term, with a fairly involved experiment to measure the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron. This is going to be all kinds of fun, because 1) I can't get into the room to set anything up until an hour before the start of class, and 2) SteelyKid is home sick, which means I can't go in to pull stuff together until about an hour before the start of class. Whee! Today's a day to (attempt to) accentuate the positive, though, so let's use this as a jumping-off point for a more upbeat topic, namely: What's the best lab you ever did in a lab science class?…

The Calculus Diaries by Jennifer Ouellette

I finished Jennifer Ouellette's new book a few weeks ago, shortly after my trip to Alabama, but it's taken me a long time to get around to reviewing it due to a combination of too much work and being a Bad Person. There's finally a tiny break in the storm of work, though, so here's a slightly belated review. The Calculus Diaries is not a book that will teach you how to do math. There aren't worked examples, detailed derivations, or homework problems in the main text. It might, however, teach you not to fear math, as it provides a witty and accessible explanation of the key concepts behind…

Counterfactual Physics: Lorentz Variance?

The theory of relativity takes its name from a very simple and appealing idea: that the laws of physics should look the same to moving observers as to stationary ones. "Laws of physics" here includes Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism, which necessarily means that moving observers must see the same speed of light as stationary observers (Einstein included the constancy of the speed of light as a second postulate in his original relativity paper, but it's redundant-- the constancy of the speed of light is a direct consequence of the principle of relativity). This leads directly…

A Tale of Two Turbos

I spent most of Saturday in the lab, swapping out a turbopump that was starting to die. How could I tell? Well, for one thing, it made an awful noise, even more than usual for a noisy pump. But after it was stopped and unmounted from the chamber, there was a simple test: comparing the rotation to a second pump that I knew was in better shape: The pump on the left (with the copper gasket stuck to it) is the old one; the pump on the right is the one that I replaced it with. As you can tell, even with a bearing starting to go, it's a pretty damn good rotor, but clearly worse than the…

Eric Hovind at Shakopee

I mentioned that Eric Hovind, son of Kent, was lecturing lying at Shakopee this weekend. A reader, Evan Olcott, made the trip and has reported back. I finally got the chance to see my first creationist in action last night - Eric Hovind (son of Kent) made an appearance at a Russian Baptist Church in Shakopee, MN. I was hoping for some of Kent's old tricks, but they were actually few and far between. A lot less science, a lot more Baptist scare-tactics... but there were some choice moments nonetheless. The church help about 500 people, probably 30-40% of them were high-school aged kids -…

Final Four Thoughts

Last week, the more annoying yelling heads on ESPN and its affiliates were all making a big show of brushing off the complaints of NCAA fans who felt the tournament was missing something due to the lack of a "Cinderella" team from a small conference making it to the round of 16. This was just foolishness from people who know nothing about basketball, they said. The chalk-y nature of the tournament was a Good Thing because it produced "compelling match-ups" in the second weekend. And ten of the twelve games just sucked. There were really only two games that had any drama at all, both involving…

links for 2009-01-13

A&M bases bonus on student input | Bryan/College Station, Texas - The Eagle ""I've never had so much trouble giving away a million dollars," Chancellor Mike McKinney said, laughing. That's because he's never spent it like this. McKinney plans to give up to $10,000 bonuses to instructors based on anonymous student evaluations" (tags: education stupid academia) Confessions of a Community College Dean: The Bright Side of Economic Freefall "With faculty (and administrative) searches being cancelled left and right, Iâm thinking that this dropoff might be the final nail in the coffin of the…

Ask a ScienceBlogger: What's in the Air?

There's a new "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question out: "A question from a friend's 9-year old son: What is in the air we breathe? What is it's chemical composition?" The short answer to this is "a little bit of everything." Pretty much any substance we have on Earth can be found in the atmosphere somewhere. The atmosphere is a pretty big place-- roughly 1044 molecules worth of stuff (that's 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, give or take). In a collection that big, you'll find just about anything you want. All we can really do when asked about the composition of the…

Experimental Physics for Morons, #47

I spent the bulk of yesterday afternoon doing vacuum system work, specifically working on the system to feed gas into the atomic beam source. My feelings about this can be inferred from the Facebook status message I set at the time: "Chad Orzel abhors a vacuum." The apparatus I'm building uses laser cooling to decelerate an atomic beam of krypton atoms in a particular metastable state. This works brilliantly to slow metastable krypton atoms down, but the only atoms affected by the laser are krypton atoms-- everything else continues along unimpeded. As a result, the entire experiment needs to…

DNA Barcoding, a reply from Alex Smith

It seems my barcoding rant from last week has caught the eye of Alex Smith of the University of Guelph.  Alex is the force behind numerous DNA barcoding projects, including the pioneering study on Malagasy trap-jaw ants, and I have elevated his reply from the comments: Hi Alex â happened by myrmecos this morning, saw your essay and the comments that have piled up over the past several days and couldnât help add my two cents. 1) A barcode is a epistemological tool, an âevaluation criteriaâ for identification and can act as a catalyst for discovery. It is not an ontological truth that defines…